Finish Capistrano / get Yale ITS deployment set up

[orenyk]

I know that this isn't really a general application issue, but we need to get the ITS deployment procedure aligned with the changes implemented in #683. We can use this to finalize the implementation of Capistrano so that we hopefully have a well-documented example of how one might deploy an instance of Reservations.

---

2015-02-15

Here are some things that need to be done.

• Document USE_LDAP and ignore .env #1104
• have deploy.rb copy over the secrets.yml.example file
• review META: Heroku #275 branch to see what else generally needs to be done

[dgoerger]

@orenyk what's left to get Capistrano working? Does it work on e.g. laptops, if I were to git clone reservations and run a cap production deploy? Is there anything I can help with on the sysadmin side?

[orenyk]

Ummm... good question. It's set up to use localhost as the server but would require a hudson user at the moment. I haven't set up deploy.rb to copy over the secrets.yml file, so that would still be necessary, but other than that you'd have to set some environment variables and it should work. Maybe we should make the user configurable as an environment variable as well so that the whole Capistrano setup is as general as possible.

From ITS' side, we're basically going to need to copy all of the Jenkins parameters into a .env file and pass the deployment path to Capistrano as an environment variable as well. We should set up a meeting over the next month or so to hash this all out, but in the meantime look over #683 and the relevant wiki pages and let me know if anything jumps out at you.

[dgoerger]

I think the localhost/hudson and secrets.yml is something INF can replace with sed for example, much like we do now---and just dump the parameters into a .env perhaps instead of running it all as bash environment variables.

These are all the BMEC vars (available in /ror_dev/ruby_deploy/reservations01/install-PROD-BMEC_properties):

rails_environment=${deployment_env}
app_path=/path/to/install/directory
database=${bmec_db}
database_host=${which_server_hosts_bmec_db}
db_username=${bmec_db_username}
db_password=${bmec_db_password}
uri=/bmec

The Configuration doc looks pretty thorough. Does it work if one submits dummy values (e.g. localhost with Yale CAS and SMTP) for both the staging and production envs? It would be best to make sure that's working before INF gets involved---once it's confirmed working, we should definitely set up a meeting with Michael and get this going. 😀